Donald Trump may not be the messenger everyone wanted but the message is what counts these days. Trump’s first State of the Union speech should be considered a smashing success – but what else would you expect from a man who swore America would start winning again if he were elected president. Mission accomplished.

Many of our communities are eroding. Civic activity is declining, and social isolation is rising. This alienation is muted in the world of elites, but it is a glaring truth every day in much of America. Absent strong communities, strong families don’t stand a chance, no matter how high the stock market goes. Trump and Congress can probably not do much to fix this. But the sunny big picture should not prompt us to ignore the ambient corruption of the way we live now.

Like the Romans, we have become an empire, committed to fighting for scores of nations, with troops on every continent and forces in combat operations of which the American people are only vaguely aware. As in all empires, power is passing to the generals. And what causes the greatest angst today in the imperial city? Fear that a four-page memo worked up in the House Judiciary Committee may discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia-gate.

Fixing that problem is easy by voting to make the tax cuts permanent so no one faces a tax hike. Many Democrats would be back with their chants of “tax cuts for the rich,” except that most of what would be permanent, put money in the pockets of the middle class. They should not use the reconciliation process, which allows a bill to pass with 51 votes in the Senate, rather than the normal 60 vote threshold. In other words, this would be a re-vote on the tax bill that passed with only Republican yes votes in the Senate in December.

The simple fact is that Donald Trump’s unlikely presidency has become an unlikely success. The economy is booming. He’s doing what he promised with foreign policy and regulations. He’s outmaneuvered the Democrats again and again on illegal aliens. He’s got the momentum. And the liberals are desperate to stop him – no matter how much doing so will hurt Normal Americans.

However poorly the President understands matters like decorum, self-control, vocabulary, and so forth, and so on, he has a feel for what works. What works, in American terms, is freedom. Interest-groupism, the ideology of the Obama White House, again and again quashed rational discussion of ways to spread prosperity by encouraging it. Lengthy is the list of Trumpian deficiencies. Nonetheless, that certain things need doing, and that in one way or another they’re getting done — the Schumers and Pelosis may not care. But look: they’re getting done.

It’s highly unlikely Donald Trump will gain many supporters among the leftist illegal alien crowd no matter what he says tonight. History proves they aren’t his friends. Therefore there’s little to be gained by reversing Trump’s campaign promise to deal with the immigration problem.

The sine qua non of transcending the sad state of America’s immigration politics is the revival of discourse over the nobility of citizenship in this great republic. The United States of America is the best of great nations and the greatest of good nations. To have any power over its life is the greatest of responsibilities. Those we elect as stewards of American citizenship must treat it as a sacred trust, and pass it on as such.

Trust me, though: He has not been sweated before like he would be in a special-counsel interview. It would be a mistake to assume that because Mueller’s team overflows with Democratic partisans, they are just like the political hacks Trump jousts with all the time. These particular prosecutors are extraordinarily good at what they do. They are not going to be cowed or charmed. If Trump agrees to speak to them, he will not be able to control the direction of the questioning; and if he loses his cool and says things that are dubious or flatly untrue, they will clean his clock.

Trump’s polices, in just one year, have begun to restructure the American economy. We’ve moved from “secular stagnation” (i.e., high taxes, massive regulation, huge government spending, and a disdain for business and investors) to a new private-sector incentive system that rewards success. America First came to Davos, and to all the multi-lateral globalists and multi-nationalist elites. And these CEOs, bureaucrats, and academics listened carefully to Trump’s words.

All eyes are on President Trump this week to see where issue discussions will lead. It could be a battle to the death over immigration is a fight Republicans should make. One way or another the president has set the stage for what promises to be a State of the Union speech to remember.

At bottom, this is a political issue, an issue of power, an issue of whether the Trump revolution will be dethroned by the deep state it was sent to this capital to corral and contain. If Trump is guilty of attempted obstruction, it appears to be not of justice, but of an injustice being perpetrated against him. He should be in no hurry to respond to the FBI, for time no longer appears to be on Mueller’s side.

The media only likes Republicans when they are passive and self-defeating. They are supposed to stand still while journalists smear them, dictate their policies, and determine their defenses, if any. What the media and the deep state can’t abide in Trump is his unwillingness to substitute their judgment for his. At the root of all the frenzied coverage is the ruling class’s arrogant pining for its lost privileges. They long for a past in which Republican presidents didn’t fight back.

Trump is neither a political philosopher nor an economic theoretician. His policy views vary from month to month and issue to issue. So, in practice, his nationalism boils down to the simple idea that the federal government ought to be serving the American people. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris," said Trump succinctly and eloquently.

Almost in spite of itself, the Republicans have a winning issue here, assuming they don’t revert to form and let the Squish Caucus weasel them into squandering it. Next November, the GOP is going to carpet bomb the Dems with ads asking voters to choose either the party that doubled their 401(k) or the party that wants to raise their taxes and that closes down the government to extort citizenship for illegal aliens.

The NFL would be doing America’s inner cities a favor by honoring the flag and those who serve it instead of denying basic free speech rights under the guise of political correctness. The days come and go but apparently Roger Goodell and company learned nothing from this season.

The Trump tax cuts could change the conventional wisdom again, even though the most significant changes were to corporate taxation, a fact Democrats are unlikely to let the president’s working-class supporters forget. Trump and the Republicans are trying very hard to sell the tax cuts. If they fail, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ preferred tax rates could wind up with a bigger constituency.

Only in America is there a compassionate people who might grant them their wish and allow them to stay. Illegal aliens shouldn’t be angry – they should be thankful. A border wall and internal enforcement is the least Democrats should offer in exchange for permission to remain here.

According to Howard Kurtz’s new book “Media Madness,” the Gingrich memo was titled, “Breaking out of the Gridlock,” and aimed at recharging the Trump White House and dodging bad press. Gingrich, the architect of the 1994 “Contract With America” that gave the GOP control of Congress, suggested a four-month Trump blitz on jobs, wages, and economic growth that would prove the Republicans could get things done.

The revelation of this information after all this time — if it is anywhere near as potent as people are rumoring with heads rolling, etc.—- is likely to cause more enmity, probably a great deal more. Still, we need to know. We live in a democracy — or think we do. We have no choice. We have to learn to live with the hate in order to defeat it. The memo must be published in its entirety — without redaction, whatever its results.